Tuesday night’s vice presidential debate pitting Trump’s JD Vance against the Democratic V-P nominee Tim Walz was important for the revelations that were and were not identified by the major media. It came in the context of a growing appreciation for “sanewashing,” the new buzzword describing what too much of the major media do for Trump – that is, to take his wildly dissociative ramblings and lies and turn them into relatively coherent policy statements. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Rob Tornoe, writing for the Editor and Publisher magazine, described it in detail in an article this week.

Among others, Tornoe cited Parker Malloy of the New Republic: “By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former — and potentially future — president.”

The level of lying and dissembling that has been the main feature of the Trump-Vance presidential campaign has so infected many in the media that it is now being dismissed as “going without saying,” as the Financial Times’ Edward Luce put it yesterday. Namely, when Vance completely ducked Walz’ question about whether or not he (Vance) believed the outcome of the 2020 election, Vance’s blatant and egregious refusal to answer was treated as just another debate point by the media, rather than as a definitively disqualifying evasion from a person who could become president. When Jim Acosta of CNN did a more persistent job of pressing Trump stooge Corey Lewandowski on the same question Wednesday morning, the answers were no less completely evasive.

So, in addition to Vance’s mendacity on that question, it was Vance’s squealing protest that the CBS debate moderators “broke the rules” by introducing facts into the conversation that should have marked a huge inflection point in the debate. “How dare you expose me as a liar!” was the jist of what Vance’s objection amounted to. He clearly thought that the “rules” of the debate should have allowed him to lie with abandon if he wanted to, the way he did, in fact, on the issues of abortion, child care and, yes, immigration policy. The New York Times’ Michael Grynbaum irresponsibly chalked it up to “confusion.”

But the Times’ Matthew Seligman noted why Vance’s lying matters so much for this election, writing, “Vance has admitted that he would have asserted an extra-constitutional power to abet Trump’s plot to remain in power…Even more chilling, Mr. Vance’s pledge about what he would have done in Mr. Pence’s place on Jan. 6, 2021, is a promise about what Mr. Vance will do on Jan. 6, 2029, should he preside over the electoral count as vice president. He is telling us more than four years in advance that if he is a candidate to be president himself, he would be willing to defy the courts and Congress to seize power regardless of the lawful outcome of the 2028 election.”